Dog brothers are the standard to which all other stick fighting schools are to be measured, in case we are talking about realistic training methods. They also incorporate grappling into their stickfighting, as well as realistic (aluminum trainer) knife training, etc.

Everything about them is widely available on the net, no secret, at least that is my understanding, as an outsider.

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An important note about your OP Hiro: Its probably inaccurate to describe the Dog Brothers as having a discipline as such.

Its true that most of them come from FMA backgrounds, but the Gatherings are open to all styles and there are several members with CMA, JMA and Krabi Krabong backgrounds/influences. If you watch videos of the more recent Euro Gatherings you'll also see a number of guys wielding WMA longswords.

Something that Crafty Dog seems quite keen on (from my reading of his work at least) is the distinction between the DBMA association, which is the "style" and the Dog Brothers, which is the group of psychos with sticks.

I'm sure some of the guys who've actually been and fought at a Gathering will be along shortly.

A fair point, realism in blade training is something that seems to provoke a lot of discussion in Dog Bros circles.

Yeah, that's my biggest complaint with the Dog Brothers fights using aluminum knife trainers - "knife" becomes "short club", and since slashes with them don't hurt, they can be ignored. It puts a real skew on how it's used.

How would (or do?) you do "alive" training that would translate to "machette combat"?

They're going at a reduced pace, since getting hit with one of those is going to be distinctly more impact than with a stick. I would say one would have to switch back and forth between blade trainers and sticks, so that you could get the higher aliveness levels of the stick, but the blade awareness of the trainers.

Yeah, that's my biggest complaint with the Dog Brothers fights using aluminum knife trainers - "knife" becomes "short club", and since slashes with them don't hurt, they can be ignored. It puts a real skew on how it's used.

To be honest I find this even with our rubber knife sparring, stabs always hurt more, so slashing gets left by the wayside.

i thought they used shock knives, so that slashes *do* hurt, am i wrong about that?

i've suggested them for my dojo's tomiki aikido classes but no one seems interested.

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